Reasons to stay alive

[robinturner]

A while ago, for no real reason, I was thinking about those life-or-death situations where people pull through against all odds because of their "will to survive". I reckon in any of those positions (trekking through an Arctic blizzard, cast adrift in the Atlantic, stranded in the Sahara etc.) I'd be a goner. My will to survive is strong enough that I remember to eat and drink (most of the time) but I've always had a pretty tenuous grip on this world - I feel I could slide off any time my concentration lapsed.

To this end, I've have prepared a list of things to remind me that life is good and death should be avoided wherever possible.

1. I am surrounded by hundreds of beautiful young women
2. Buffy on Saturday nights, Angel on Sundays, South Park on Saturdays AND Sundays
3. It takes more effort to kill than be killed, but it's a lot more fun
4. Chocolate
5. Raki
6. Bach, Mozart and Monteverdi
7. I might get reincarnated as a starving peasant or a middle manager
8. My people need me to combat the Forces of Darkness
9. There's always an update around the corner

Comments

Another reason to stay alive

[regyt.livejournal.com]

10. Daniel Kolak's translator's preface to the Tractatus. I'm not at all kidding. For example, “Wittgenstein appeared to me once in a dream, and I realized later, upon waking, that he had come in the guise of the actor James Dean; he gave me “notes” on my “performance” in the class that (in my dream) I was teaching on Wittgenstein and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle and he was utterly disgusted with my (then, now former) lack of spontaneity; his final attack consisted of a Kripke-like pounding of fists on a poor, frightened (dream) student’s desk and the bloodcurdling scream from which I (think I) awoke: “Square the circle, square the circle, you must square the circle!””

Re: Another reason to stay alive

[solri.livejournal.com]

I wonder what it was about Wittgenstein that exerted such a hypnotic fascination on his students - a lot of them even acquired his mannerisms and way of dressing, often unconsciously (I remember reading how a woman would, on being asked a question, close her eyes and frown deeply - turned out she'd been taught by Wittgenstein!).

I haven't tried the desk-pounding thing, though I have been known to scream on occasion. I also pulled a student's hair once, but that was a controlled experiment, so it doesn't count.

And yet another reason to stay alive

[regyt.livejournal.com]

Very charismatic people do that, the ones who transcend personhood and become characters in our lives. We just know it as part of the Wittgenstein legend because the man was brilliant as well as vibrant and charismatic. And, partially, because of sheer luck.

A lot of my speech patterns can be traced to various such characters in my life. Ending tangents with a brusque "But I digress!" before returning to my main point comes straight from a professor named Cherniak, for example. The melody of my most disjointed rants is sometimes his as well. And every time I mention granting someone agency, though the thought was mine and mine alone, the word 'agency' for it comes straight from an old friend of mine. It's quite possibly his fault that I tell my mother that I'll be 'going out for sushi with n people tonight' and so on.

And I can't even begin to tell you how weird it was to realize I was trying to explain a concept in contracts law to someone with an example from Borges's Argumentum Ornithologicum, but that's another story.

Oh, and...

11. Girls in other countries rely on you to be able to discuss Wittgenstein online at their every whim.

Re: And yet another reason to stay alive

[solri.livejournal.com]

I suppose that's as good a reason as any. I can just picture myself crawling through a blizzard as sensation leaces my limbs, muttering "Got to ... keep ... going. Must ... discuss ... Blue Book ... tonight."

BTW, I've just finished reading A Philosophical Investigation by David Kerr. It's a twenty-minutes-into-the-future detective novel with a serial killer who shoots serial killers and is obsessed by Wittgenstein. Fun, but needs a better writer to bring it off (Ruth Rendell springs to mind).

It's funny how the mind works. When I picked up the book, the author seemed familiar (as in personally familiar - I haven't read anything else by him). It turned out this was due to the following process:

1. David Kerr also wrote a book called The March Violets.
2. Many years ago I knew a girl called Rosie Garland, who did vocals with the Goth group, The March Violets (unbelievably, Rosie Garland was her real name).
3. Rosie did a few sessions with a group I was in called Babel.
4. Babel's bass player was at the time going out with a girl whose surname was Kerr.

Phew - if my subconscious works that hard, it's not surprising I have so little mental energy left for grading papers, which is what I should be doing at the moment.

Re: And yet another reason to stay alive

[asteriskhere.livejournal.com]

I can just picture myself crawling through a blizzard as sensation leaces my limbs, muttering "Got to ... keep ... going. Must ... discuss ... Blue Book ... tonight."

Ha, that's one of the funniest things I've read in a while.

Re: And yet another reason to stay alive

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

I read that book! It was middling!

I got somethin to add....

[tristan-moore.livejournal.com]

I would add world domination, but I dont think its in the budget for next quarter >:)

Re: I got somethin to add....

[solri.livejournal.com]

Start small. Find a major hardware company who are thinking of branching out. Write a really cruddy operating system for them. Get lots of gullible people to buy it. Where possible, use illegal tactics to force out the competition; otherwise, create fear, uncertainty, doubt.